30-Day Delegation Challenge

May 14, 2018

Today I’m kicking off a new 30-day challenge focused on delegation and outsourcing. I’ll be blogging about this experience along the way to share lessons, insights, and mistakes, although not necessarily daily.

For 30 days in a row, I’ll work on delegating and outsourcing tasks (both personal and work-related) in some fashion.

My specific commitment is to invest at least one hour per day on delegation and outsourcing activities. This could include brainstorming tasks to delegate, defining tasks, working through potential blocks and limiting beliefs, finding people to work with, testing and evaluating outsourcing services, assigning tasks, following up, and anything that could reasonably fall within the scope of this exploration. I won’t, however, count the time that I spend blogging about it or checking in with accountability partners. I may do more than an hour some days, but one hour is my daily minimum. This includes all 30 days, weekends too.

There are other ways to do this challenge, such as outsourcing at least one task per day, but I think the time commitment approach makes sense because it gives me some flexibility in how I move the needle forward each day. I still feel accountable to action, but it doesn’t feel as forced and artificial as having to delegate something every single day (which could feel a bit random after a while). As long as I’m devoting at least 60 minutes to activities related to delegating and/or outsourcing, I’ll give myself credit for honoring the challenge that day.

One aspect of this challenge appeals to me strongly: finding and following a path with a heart. I’d like to learn how to delegate and outsource tasks in ways that feel aligned to me, but right now I don’t know how I’ll pull that off. I’d also like to explore how to delegate in non-boring ways with an element of playfulness and fun.

Ultimately I’d like this challenge to help steer me in the direction of having an awesome, heart-centered, fun-loving team to work with on a variety of interesting creative projects. I want to put a nice 30-day dent into exploring this, so I can open up more possibilities for delegation and team building going forward.

This is a social challenge too. It involves other groups participating with me, including some members of Conscious Growth Club. We’ll be sharing ideas, actions, and results with each other along the way. We can also hold each other accountable and encourage each other as we go along. I often get better results when I turn my own personal challenges into social ones. This helps increase the energy flow, the idea flow, and the commitment level.

If this challenge appeals to you too, you’re welcome to do it with us. Feel free to define your own daily commitment – it doesn’t have to mirror mine. For some participants it’s about growing a business. For others it’s more about personal outsourcing (cleaning, groceries, laundry, etc). And for some it’s mainly about expanding their horizons and developing new skills.

This is a tough challenge for many people, myself included, since it takes us outside of our comfort zones. Even those with significant delegation experience often see much room for improvement. We all have our various fears, limiting beliefs, and negative expectations to work through. And of course one way to work through them is with direct action. This is a challenge where we learn by doing.